When you teach something in detail and in-depth to another person, you will have to verbalise all your thoughts in detail. In doing so you may discover that there are gaps in what you thought you fully understood. you don’t completely understand yourself. That means that by teaching a person, you will also teach yourself in the process.

When you mentor and help a person that is just starting in their professional journey, you will have to go back to your beginnings….to where everything began. This will by default increase and re-invigorate many of the connections you have with your colleagues and within your own organisation. People who didn’t know you before will start to see you as a leader.

You are at the top of you game. All processes and procedures are now a set routine (perhaps even numbing your everyday tasks). Helping and mentoring a person may break this routine and can motivate you to start a new project as talking about how you started, how you solved issues, require to see your world through fresh eyes and really see and fully understand how much you have accomplished in your career as you’ll be forced to compare yourself to someone who is just starting out. Looking at all your contributions and achievements in this way re-energises your work life.

Re-energise your career! It is proven that people are highly motivated when they start a new project or job (there is lots of research that prove this). You start seeing your own contributions make a change in someone’s life again. Sometimes, once you are on top of your game things start becoming more of a business that sometimes moved away from your initial objective and mission (you go back to seeing your job as a calling rather than tasks or a paycheck).

Remember how you felt when you started? You would have welcomed any knowledge from somebody with experience. Any tips, advice or expert guidance could have changed your life and these type of scenarios would always be appreciated. Share your experiences and help to change someone’s life! Regardless if you ever wanted to be a teacher, sharing your knowledge with others will always be empowering.

Tap into your leadership abilities through advising a mentee. You will be forced to answer questions perhaps nobody had asked you before. Which means you will look at things from a different perspective. By default, this will open new thinking avenues towards a particular topic you thought was totally solved or developed.

After your message gets out, young professionals will improve their skills and therefore become better at their jobs. Chances are other innovators in your field would like to copy you and may want to do the same. Imagine if all the movers of shakers of your industry start passing their message and mentoring young professionals? Not only your organisation but the entire industry would drastically improve.

As the number of young professionals that rise through the ranks of their own professions (your mentees) and capitalise on the success that you helped them achieve continue to propagate in your industry, the amount of people that will see you as the leader and expert in their field increases as well. This will open you to new professional avenues like speaking at conferences or consulting opportunities.

Becoming a mentor will not only help you as a person and as a professional, but it will also help your own organisation as it conveys a message to your staff that management is willing to invest in its employees (therefore creating a more positive work environment). This may also encourage other members of your leadership team to become mentors themselves. The people outside the organisation will also notice this same message and you may get an increase in top quality prospective employees.

As you can see, there is so much you can gain by sharing some of your knowledge and time. For a small effort, you will be helping many. Please consider becoming an e-mentor. Contact us today! We’re always happy to talk to you.